Skills for Success

The Skills for Success programme at Beaumont was developed internally to help our pupils develop skills which will enable them to both learn well and achieve highly. Since its conception in June 2010 we felt that it was important that the language of Skills for Success should be embedded in all that we do in school. Our pupils understand well the skills they need to develop in order to succeed both in their studies and beyond school life – they know what is meant by a “Quality Question”; they understand that just being in a lesson is not enough – they need to “Tune In”; they recognise the need to “Take Ownership”. We have found that we no longer have to help them understand the language and see what it means to them individually, although they still need activities to help them practise those skills both in Form Time and in lessons. We are now moving the programme on to PHASE TWO.

The next area where we want to focus in our list of skills is “BE PERSISTENT”. We will be integrating this idea and language into all activities from September 2014, and providing staff with ideas for how to help pupils with this skill in lesson time. For year 10 and above, we have some activities which will directly focus on the need to persevere when times are hard, on skills that are difficult, in areas where they feel less confident. We want to help address the issues raised by business leaders (in the words of James Dyson):

“But that’s the point about analysis and failure. Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That’s what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there’s nothing in it. There’s no interest, you learn nothing actually” http://gu.com/p/3p2qb